[xkcdfanboy]

It's interesting that the two responses on here (yours included) so far mention that it was learned for scripting. The main reason I made the initial post is because I see it being used for much more than just scripting, ie. rails and ruby motion. It seems somewhat naive to use a scripting language in leui of a real language when coding something industrial. So I still am at a loss... Thank you for your comment, yeah it does seem a lot more powerful than Python. I am not a fan of python's requirement of object methods requiring the self arg, dastardly!

[zachlatta]

Scripting languages are "real" languages. Also, RubyMotion projects are compiled down to machine code, not interpreted.

[csense]

> python's requirement of object methods requiring the self arg

I originally hated it too, but it's grown on me. I've come to the conclusion that it's good to have that explicit signal that something is a member variable rather than a local. And I've started adding explicit "this." to member variables in all my Java programs.

[dpritchett]

Rails helps minimize time to market. Any sizeable Rails app that gets market traction is likely to have its hotspots revisited and broken out into services. The services need not use Ruby at all.

Edit: Ruby itself is just a language. If you're not building web apps or server scripts there's no particular reason to prefer it.

[websitescenes]

You can make iPhone apps with anything you want. You can even use plain html5 and js. There are many, many options to utilize your preferred language in app development. It's definitely not just Ruby.